Award-Winning GMing Advice
Gnome Stew won the silver ENnie Award for Best Blog in
2011 and
2010 -- thank you for your support! Online since 2008, we've published
1,109 articles packed with GMing tips and advice, as well as
two books for GMs. Our
top 30 articles make a great starting point for new readers.
"I check Gnome Stew every day." -- Monte Cook
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"If you aren’t reading Gnome Stew, you’re missing out." -- Wolfgang Baur
The supers genre seems fairly straightforward. Discussions of themes and ages aside, most supers games and campaigns follow a fairly standardized set of plot structures. Oddly though, in the unassuming supers game lies some potent forms of player narrative control. Chief among these is the PC origin story.
In the supers origin story, the player generally gets to dictate the way in which the PC gained or discovered their ...
I just got finished with my stint at Con on the Cob. I and the other gnomes, who schlepped it out to Ohio for the convention, had a blast. By and far one of the best moments of the convention for me was the total improv game I ran on Sunday. The title of it was “WHOSE GAME IS IT ANYWAYS” and the description read like this: ...
On Thursday I read about a new book by called Hamlet’s Hit Points coming out through Gameplaywright Press. Their book Things We think About Games is a carry everywhere book for me. It sits in my very-manly-not-a-purse courier bag alongside a few other books, work things, and the odd death ray or two. Hamlet’s Hit Points is written by Robin D. Laws, and when I saw the announcement ...
Over in the Suggestion Pot, Gnome Stew reader renner asked us to write an article on this topic:
How do you handle a narrative combat? Mainly, if you are used to miniatures and maps, and don’t want to use them anymore.
Prior to D&D 3.0, the majority of RPGs used narrative combat -- IE, combat that's largely descriptive, with a sketchy map if a map is used at all. From ...
Recently, I have found myself gravitating towards games that include a task resolution mechanic that includes a way to measure the margin of success on a check. It started over a year ago, with my short-lived Witchcraft campaign, and then flowed into my year-long Corporation game, and recently it became a requirement for picking the system for my latest campaign, In Nomine. Of all the mechanical elements of ...
It is no secret that I’m a fan of shared narrative in the games I run and create. If you are unfamiliar with the term, shared narrative is essentially handing narrative control of the story over to the players instead of the Game Master. If you want a more detailed explanation of shared narrative, here is an article that I wrote on the subject a while back. ...
As I've started to run more and more published settings and adventures, I find myself doing something new to my GMing style. I've been turning the adventure/setting/rule book to my players and just pointing to art that is built into the product.
Using pictures to backup description isn't a new practice to me, but I usually try to first use a verbal description to hook the players into the ...
